Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

The Making of an Iran Policy

THE JPEG REVOLUTION Images of the June uprisings in Iran, captured by amateur photographers. The protests unsettled not only the hard-liners in Tehran but also the Obama administration, which has to make policy for a situation that changes as frequently as a Twitter feed.

The silent protest began in Imam Khomeini Square in front of the forbidding Ministry of Telecommunications, which was busy cutting off cellphones but powerless to stop the murmured rage coursing through Tehran. Six days had passed since Iran’s disputed June 12 election, but the fury that brought three million people onto the streets the previous Monday showed no sign of abating. “Silence will win against bullets,” a woman beside me whispered. Her name was Zahra. She wore a green headband — the color adopted by the campaign of the defeated reformist candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi — and she held a banner saying, “This land is my land.” The words captured the popular conviction that not only had President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stolen votes, but he also had made off with Iran’s dignity. Slowly the vast crowd began to move north. No chant issued from the throng, only distilled indignation. A young man asked me where I was from. When I told him New York, he shot back: “Give our regards to freedom. It’s coming right here!”

In those giddy postelectoral days, anything seemed possible, even the arrival of liberty, or at least more of it, in the 30-year-old Islamic Republic. Through the swirl of events — the huge crowds, the beatings and the sirens, the tear gas and black smoke — the core issues were simple. Iranians felt cheated. They wanted their votes to count. They knew that no genuine victor with two-thirds of the vote need resort to brutality or fear a recount. Sometimes they asked me if the United Nations would help them; often they asked if America would. It was their way of saying, with fierce emotion, that the morality of the Iranian story, its right and wrong, was plain.

But it was precisely emotion, and notions of good and evil, that the Obama administration had spent the previous months trying to drain from the charged U.S.-Iranian relationship. Sobriety dominated the ideas of the president’s Iran team, as I’d learned before I left in conversations with senior officials at the State Department and the National Security Council. The Bush administration’s ideologically driven axis-of-evil approach to Iran had failed. Tehran had prospered by expanding its regional influence and was accelerating its nuclear program. The Obama administration believed it was time to seek normalization through a new, cooler look at a nation critical to U.S. strategic interests — from advancing Israeli-Arab peace negotiations to a successful withdrawal from Iraq.

“Who they select as leader in Iran is their prerogative, and there’s nothing we can do to control that,” Ray Takeyh, an Iranian-born adviser to Dennis Ross, the veteran Mideast negotiator who has been working on Iran for the Obama administration, told me before the election. “We’re trying to deal with Iran as an entity, a state, rather than privileging one faction or another. We want to inject a degree of rationality into this relationship, reduce it to two nations with some differences and some common interests — get beyond the incendiary rhetoric.” Takeyh’s words reminded me of Ross, who in his book “Statecraft” defined the term’s first principles as, “Have clear objectives, tailor them to fit reality.”

But now, as the crowd streaming before me demonstrated, Iran’s reality had changed. In his inaugural address, President Obama said: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Seldom had a fist been clenched more unequivocally, dissent silenced more harshly or deceit practiced with more brazenness than in Iran after June 12.

Still, Obama’s Iran team — Ross; the courtly under secretary of state William Burns; the dapper deputy national security adviser Tom Donilon; the studious senior N.S.C. official Puneet Talwar (the only one, other than Takeyh, who has been to Iran); the hard-charging organization man Denis McDonough, who controls strategic communication at the White House — faced a difficult choice between sticking with strategic outreach to the regime and questioning its legitimacy in the name of human rights. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose instincts on Iran have always been more hawkish than the president’s, “was pushing for a harder line sooner after the June 12 vote,” a Mideast expert close to her told me last month. She was supported by her friend Joe Biden, the vice president. They did not prevail. The tone was cautious; although Obama’s denunciations of the clampdown grew stronger as it worsened, the extended hand, which had proved more unsettling to Iran than all the Bush administration bluster, was not withdrawn.

When I returned from Iran, I went to see one of these senior officials to ask what it had been like making that call. Painful, was the response. Every day, in the election’s aftermath, the team met and conference-called. “It is difficult to weigh all the different considerations,” this official told me. “But given the profoundly serious consequences of an Iranian regime that acquires a nuclear-weapons capability, the judgment in the end was that it was important to follow through on the offer of direct engagement.” He noted that this offer had been “signaled clearly in the course of the campaign” by Obama, and developed since. In other words, this goes deep with the president. He’s driving Iran policy. The Iran gambit lies close to the core of his refashioned global strategy, America’s “new era of engagement.”

Just how far Obama is ready to go in engagement’s name has become clearer in Iran. At the time of that Thursday demonstration, almost a week after the election, the toughest thing he had found to say about the turmoil was that the suppression of peaceful dissent “is of concern to me and it’s of concern to the American people.” He had also equated Ahmadinejad with Moussavi, from the U.S. national-security standpoint, because both support the nuclear program, even as people died for the greater openness that Moussavi espoused.

A sobered America is back in the realpolitik game. A favored phrase in the Iran team goes, “It is what it is.” Now the question is whether such an approach can yield results. Can Ross honor his own precept to match objectives with “available means”? To the nuclear clock has been added a democracy clock, complicating every diplomatic equation. An Iran of mullahs and nukes has morphed, for many Americans, into the Iran of beautiful, young Neda Agha-Soltan, cut down with a single shot while leaving a June 20 demonstration, a murder caught on video that went viral. Whatever Obama’s realism — and it’s as potent as his instinct for the middle ground — a president on whom so much youthful idealism has been projected can scarcely ignore the Neda effect.

The Obama administration’s strong conviction, as several officials told me, is that Ahmadinejad’s election was fraudulent. But in the American interest, it is ready to overlook that and to talk. Restored relations with the Soviet Union came in 1933 at the time of the Great Terror, and with China in 1972 in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. But of course the bloodshed then — of an altogether different dimension — was not being YouTubed around the globe.

One of the first people I saw in Iran was Saeed Leylaz, an economist close to Moussavi. (Like many of Iran’s reformist intellectuals, Leylaz is now in jail.) He told me Obama’s outreach — his recognition of the Islamic Republic and pledge of “mutual respect” — had affected the campaign, unsettling hard-liners. “Radicalism creates radicalism,” Leylaz said. He was referring to the way President Bush’s talk of Iran as evil opened the way for Ahmadinejad to build a global brand of sorts through lambasting U.S. arrogance.

By contrast, a black American president of partly Muslim descent reaching out to the Islamic world — and demonstrating, by his very election, the possibility of change — had placed the Iranian regime on the defensive. One conservative Iranian official put it this way to Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “If Iran can’t make nice with a U.S. president named Barack Hussein Obama who’s preaching mutual respect and sending us greetings, it’s pretty clear the problem lies in Tehran, not Washington.”

The Obama administration — as Donilon, Takeyh and others made clear to me — had been deliberately agnostic on the election outcome and had tried to finesse electoral uncertainty by directing its diplomatic overture chiefly at Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. In early May, Obama sent Khamenei a secret personal letter, as The Washington Times reported. The letter proposed a framework for talks on the nuclear issue (which Khamenei is believed to control) and regional security. I was reliably informed by more than one knowledgeable American that Khamenei had answered in writing, but the reply was disappointing. Still, it was a response — and Khamenei had already replied in March to a conciliatory message sent by Obama on Nowruz, the Persian new year, by saying, “Should you change, our behavior will change, too.” The administration was geared to bring its engagement policy to fruition after the June 12 election.

The two things it had not planned for, however, were a situation of near-insurrection and Khamenei’s shift out of the arbiter’s lofty cover into explicit alignment with Ahmadinejad. Yet here, all of a sudden, was a situation where Obama’s outreach may have helped throw the Islamic Republic into crisis, leaving it more divided than at any time since immediately after the revolution in 1979. So it’s perhaps no wonder that Obama responded cautiously, clearly trying, with difficulty, to adapt a set strategy to an explosive situation, not wanting to cut the slender thread established to Khamenei but increasingly outraged by what he saw.

Some protesters I met on the streets of Tehran pointedly asked me, “Where’s Obama?” Trying to rethink things, it seems. Khamenei’s own shift was cemented in his ferocious sermon a week after the election, when he embraced Ahmadinejad and tried to blame the whole bloody fiasco on “evil” Western agents. This stance undermined the thinking Ross and others had put forward in their thorough pre-election review of Iran policy. “The theory was always that you deal with the supreme leader because Ahmadinejad is not the ultimate decision maker,” said a senior official who has been instrumental in formulating Iran policy. “But then he takes Ahmadinejad’s side. You still have to make the effort, the ground has to be covered, but it’s hard to be very optimistic.”

How long Iran’s disarray will persist is unclear — certainly weeks, probably months, perhaps longer. It is possible that Khamenei, come the fall, may see in outreach to the United States a means to regain support in a country where whoever delivers normalization with Washington will be a popular hero. It is possible that Ahmadinejad will bring moderates into his government, to be formed in August, with a similar conciliatory aim. One key indicator will be whether he keeps Saeed Jalili, described to me as a chief architect of the clampdown, as his nuclear negotiator. If he does, talks are probably a waste of time. It is even a remote possibility that Ahmadinejad will be removed in the name of reconciliation. But one thing is certain: Iran’s upheaval has made Obama’s already ambitious goal of engagement far more arduous, and it reinforced the darkest views of Iran’s true nuclear ambitions, even as it chews up limited time.

There was always an orphaned feel to the Office of the Special Adviser to the Secretary of State for the Gulf and Southwest Asia. It was located just past the main entrance to the State Department in a string of tawdry rooms, a long way from the gilded mirrors and chandeliers up on the seventh floor, where top officials congregate. For four months starting in late February, Dennis Ross made this dun-colored warren his home. Then, in late June, he forsook one opaque title for another: Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for the Central Region.

The “central region,” a U.S. diplomatic neologism, includes the central locus of American concerns for war and peace: the danger lands between Israel and Pakistan. In his new post, Ross is moving from State to the National Security Council, from Hillary Clinton’s universe to Obama’s. For now he’s shuttling between the two. That’s a familiar form of motion for a go-between who devoted years to knocking Israeli and Palestinian heads together in a vain quest for peace. As he goes, Ross, who is 60, nurses a late-life obsession that never surfaced — indeed, was artfully hidden — in the descriptions of his two jobs: Iran. But beneath the White House and Foggy Bottom circumlocutions, Iran is Ross’s new thing.

Ross, like almost every serving U.S. diplomat, has never set foot in Iran. Thirty years of severed relations since the 1979 Iranian revolution have put any firsthand experience at a premium. But Ross is skilled at circumventing obstacles. With his mild, blue-eyed gaze, he is a survivor. In fact he’s one of the ultimate Washington survivors, having glided from Republican to Democratic administrations for more than a quarter-century. As it became clear in recent years that Iran, still marginal during the Camp David negotiations in 2000, had moved toward the hub of Middle Eastern matters, Ross moved with it. He has his finger to the wind. He also has a deep intellectual commitment to peacemaking and Israeli security, issues on which an Iran with a fast-growing nuclear program now impinges with centrifugal intensity.

“Iran is sucking up the oxygen, it’s everywhere in town, to the point that even Arab-Israeli issues seem somehow derivative,” Aaron David Miller, a former diplomat who worked for many years alongside Ross, told me. “And Dennis saw the handwriting on the wall.”

Part of that handwriting was that nonengagement had failed. Iran, for nigh on two generations of U.S. diplomats, has been the great black hole. “Diplomacy is conducted face to face between human beings, but I worked for three years, day in, day out, on Iran and never got to meet an Iranian diplomat,” Nicholas Burns, who was under secretary of state from 2005 to 2008 (and is no relation to his successor as under secretary, William Burns), told me. “The policy did not work.”

Over eight Bush years, Iran became stronger. American intervention had rid it of its Taliban enemy to the east and the hated Saddam Hussein to the west. Iran installed 7,200 centrifuges, produced more than a ton of low-enriched uranium and made a decisive step toward the threshold nuclear status that could prompt an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear installations. The hawks of the Bush administration threatened, but their aims, in Ross’s phrase, were not matched to means. Already at war in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military had no stomach for a third front in the Muslim world — a calculus not lost on Iranian leaders.

I went to see the Ross team, still in the State Department warren, on my return from Tehran. Ross talks in an even patter that bears a laid-back trace of his native California. He has a penchant for intricate phrases like: If they’re not responding, nonresponse would become a response. An engaging sincerity and a smile offset this highfalutin streak. His message to me in March was: we have a ticking clock to armed conflict; our former policy has failed; so let’s see if we can’t identify a set of their objectives not completely incompatible with ours. Now he wanted to hear all about the tumult I had witnessed. His response was measured: the president has laid out a path, we have to be judicious, not make a leap in one direction or another, and so put the onus on Iran. (Ross declined my request for an on-the-record interview.)

Balance is something this meticulous diplomat prizes. But a recurrent issue with Ross, who embraced the Jewish faith after being raised in a nonreligious home by a Jewish mother and Catholic stepfather, has been whether he is too close to the American Jewish community and Israel to be an honest broker with Iran or Arabs. Miller, after years of working with Ross, concluded in a book that he “had an inherent tendency to see the world of Arab-Israeli politics first from Israel’s vantage point rather than that of the Palestinians.” Another former senior State Department official, who requested anonymity because he didn’t want to jeopardize his relationship with the administration, told me, “Ross’s bad habit is preconsultation with the Israelis.” Ross earned $421,775 from speeches last year, of which more than half came from Israeli and Jewish groups, according to a financial-disclosure statement.

But Ross has argued in his books that his passion for peace guides him in an evenhanded attempt to pursue every possible diplomatic avenue. “He’s the most intellectually flexible, thoughtful and pragmatic person I have met,” Takeyh told me. “I’ve never had a conversation with him where he says we shouldn’t consider something because it would cross some Israeli red line. That’s just not where we are. The idea that he’s just looking for engagement with Iran to tick some box before moving to harsh measures is just wrong and fraudulent.”

Israel, which sees an existential threat in a nuclear Iran, has made clear that its patience is limited. The Ross team does not think Israelis are bluffing. They believe Israel views Iran in life-and-death terms. Israeli officials have argued that they don’t believe Iran would ever be crazy enough to nuke them but do believe the change in the balance of power with a nuclear or near-nuclear Iran could be so decisive that Jews would begin to leave Israel.

So Ross’s old and new obsessions — Israel and Iran — have merged in a perilous countdown. As he moves to the N.S.C. to work alongside his old friend Tom Donilon, he faces a fundamental question: can this baggage-encumbered veteran who wrote an 800-page tome on Israel-Palestine called “The Missing Peace” overcome ingrained habits and sympathies to uncover what’s been missing? Obama is trying to reinvent Middle East thinking. He’s questioning America’s uncritical stance toward Israel, drawing Syria in and pursuing the Iran gambit against great odds. Conventional thinking will not deliver what the president seeks.

The odyssey that has now led Ross to the N.S.C. has been bizarre. His original appointment at State was a fiasco. Weeks before the inauguration, an internal memo from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he was working, was leaked. It said Ross “has accepted an invitation to join the Obama administration as ambassador at large and senior adviser to Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton. In that seventh-floor job, designed especially for him, Ambassador Ross will be the secretary’s top adviser on a range of Middle East issues, from the Arab-Israeli peace process to Iran.”

Clinton was displeased. The no-drama Obama team felt jostled. But Obama owed Ross one. He was influential during the campaign in bringing around the American Jewish community.

For a month after the inauguration, Ross hovered in limbo. The eventual fudge was the Iran dossier at State, disguised in a broader job description, and communicated in a stealth nocturnal announcement. But William Burns, the former ambassador to Moscow, whom Obama had met and liked in Russia on his first overseas trip as a senator, had already taken on Iran as under secretary of state.

The situation was uncomfortable. When I asked at the White House in April if Ross was the point man on Iran, I met with the retort that the address for Iran at the State Department was clear: Bill Burns. When Burns — who worked under Ross on Middle East issues during James Baker’s tenure as secretary of state and now found himself senior to him — went to London in April to brief allies on the new U.S.-Iran policy, he did not take Ross with him. Instead, he traveled with Talwar, the National Security Council official working on Iran. One Iranian-American sometimes consulted by the administration told me he’d had calls from the White House, asking, “Will the Iranians be prepared to meet with Ross?”

That was a reasonable question given Ross’s well-known ties with the American Jewish community and the sometimes hawkish views on Iran — including endorsing a report that called for Obama to “begin augmenting the military lever right away” — that he expressed before his appointment. (Ross also argued at other times for unconditional engagement backed by the threat of draconian sanctions.) When I was in Iran in February, a conservative newspaper editor, Hossein Shariatmadari, told me, “If you want to signal a hard line and no change toward Iran, nobody does that better for you than Ross.”

At State, there were also issues. Ross, who assembled an eight-member crew in his first-floor office, was far from Clinton’s inner circle up on the seventh floor. She made it clear from the outset she wanted a fresh Mideast team. “He was not a happy camper,” Martin Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel, told me, referring to Ross.

But tensions were contained within the no-drama collegiality that is Obama’s diktat. Clinton has worked hard to bury her own Iran differences with the president, to avoid getting Powellized and to be what Indyk calls “the good, disciplined lieutenant.” While calling Iran’s postelection actions “deplorable and unacceptable” in a foreign-policy speech on July 15, Clinton said: “We remain ready to engage with Iran, but the time for action is now. The offer will not remain open indefinitely.”

Her Iran role, however, is clearly ancillary. Policy is being driven from the White House. McDonough told me the president asks about Iran “on a very regular basis and is very personally involved in this policy.” Now Obama will have Ross close by. The clincher to the move came when Obama’s June visit to Saudi Arabia proved disappointing. He got neither the Saudi help on Israel-Palestine nor the Saudi acceptance of prisoners from Guantánamo Bay that he had hoped for. The conclusion: more heft and Middle East experience, of the Ross variety, was needed at the N.S.C. Obama called Clinton personally to tell her Ross was moving.

The transfer was a neat solution. It took Ross out of the front line in any eventual bilateral talks with Iran — a role that Ross had hoped to play but that the White House never saw him in. It got him out of Clinton and Burns’s immediate orbit, where his role was uneasy. Sure, the move marooned some new recruits in the first-floor State Department warren, irritated some National Security Council staff members who got a superior they didn’t feel they needed and worried the Mideast envoy, George Mitchell. But whoever said government, even Obama government, was not messy?

In Tehran, just before the election, I sat down with Nasser Hadian, who once taught at Columbia and is now at Tehran University. He’s an influential thinker on foreign affairs who got to know Ross while he was in the United States. Hadian told me that Iran has taken Obama’s outreach seriously. Hadian has been part of a group of foreign-policy experts, convened by Mahmoud Vaezi at the Center for Strategic Research in Tehran, who have been meeting every two weeks to review how to respond to the U.S. offer. Vaezi prepares reports that are submitted to Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the reformist former president who has been bitterly critical of the June 12 vote, and to Khamenei himself.

The discussions, I was told, have been detailed, including a review of who might lead any eventual bilateral negotiations from the Iranian side. One name that has been proposed is Ali Akbar Velayati, a former foreign minister who is a top adviser to Khamenei. In this light, the fact that Velayati praised Obama after the election for remaining quiet about it is interesting. Velayati also said, “America accepts a nuclear Iran, but Britain and France cannot stand a nuclear Iran.” This is a new language, however wide of the truth. The bizarre official lambasting of Britain — and demonizing of the BBC rather than the Voice of America — can be seen as the Iranian authorities trying to keep their U.S. options open.

“My argument in all the meetings has been: You have to go for full normalization and comprehensive engagement on all the issues,” Hadian told me. “Not a U.S. consulate in Tehran, or the nuclear issue in isolation; that won’t work. And because I know we cannot normalize unless Israeli concerns are addressed, I’ve argued that Ross would be an important assurance, someone able to convince the American Jewish lobby that any eventual agreement is workable.” That view, he suggested, had gained some traction in Tehran.

Hadian said Iran has looked at everyone in the policy mix — Burns, Ross, Talwar, Vali Nasr (an Iranian-American aide to Richard Holbrooke, the State Department envoy), Gary Samore (a nonproliferation expert at the N.S.C.), Tony Blinken (a national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden) — and the general feeling was positive. “What Obama has already done for the United States in the Muslim world is unbelievable,” he said. “It is not easy for anyone here to attack him.”

But Hadian is a reformist who backed Moussavi. The Iran he talked about has not disappeared postelection — Velayati is as influential as ever — but it’s shaken. Khamenei, who just turned 70, knows he is vulnerable right now; it’s far from clear he’d be ready to negotiate from vulnerability. His suspicion of the United States is deep; anti-Americanism has worked for him over a 20-year rule. “Khamenei still believes the United States wants to go back to the patron-client relationship and the nuclear issue is being used for that,” Sadjadpour, of the Carnegie Endowment, told me. Even if he chooses to talk, would it not be in pursuit of a familiar Iranian tactic — stringing things out, as the centrifuges spin, until cracks appear among the Western allies, or China and Russia come to Tehran’s defense?

One thing is clear: Iran is no position to talk right now. It has no functioning national-security apparatus as its leaders scramble to shore up the regime. The republican pillar of the Islamic Republic has been destroyed to salvage a hard-line rightist order, but the price of this violent gamble in terms of lost support, internal division and external criticism has been immense. Iran has morphed in the global consciousness, to the point that U2 and Madonna have adopted the cause of Iranian democracy. With oil down and opposition up, Iran’s regional ascendancy is stalled or already in reverse.

On April 29, in Dammam, in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, Ross sat down with King Abdullah. He talked to a skeptical monarch about the Obama administration’s engagement policy with Iran — and talked and talked and talked. When the king finally got to speak, according to one U.S. official fully briefed on the exchange, he began by telling Ross: “I am a man of action. Unlike you, I prefer not to talk a lot.” Then he posed several pointed questions about U.S. policy toward Iran: What is your goal? What will you do if this does not work? What will you do if the Chinese and the Russians are not with you? How will you deal with Iran’s nuclear program if there is not a united response? Ross, a little flustered, tried to explain that policy was still being fleshed out.

The exchange was a useful reminder that the Obama administration is going to have to work very hard, even with its allies, to present a united front to Iran. Saudi Arabia may be full of millennial Arab suspicion of the Persians, and Ross may have all sorts of ideas about how the Saudis could use their petropower to undermine the Iranians (including by selling more oil to China), but the fact is the Saudis have had normal relations with Iran since 1991 and will always be more comfortable making life difficult for a Jewish state than for a fellow Muslim nation.

If the Saudis are difficult, they pale by comparison with the Russians and Chinese, who are partners with the U.S. in the six-power effort (known as P5+1) to curb Iran’s nuclear program. Indeed, what looms for the Obama administration is a core test, over Iran, of its new foreign-policy doctrine. This was defined by Hillary Clinton as follows: “We will lead by inducing greater cooperation among a greater number of actors and reducing competition, tilting the balance away from a multipolar world and toward a multipartner world.”

But for all Obama’s efforts to multipartner — by reviving the relationship with Russia and a similar outreach to the Chinese — it is far from clear that Moscow and Beijing do not still see America’s Iran problem as a useful tool in building a multipolar world less dominated by Washington. Getting them to impose sanctions that really bite will be difficult. Iran is awash in Chinese products — trade has boomed in recent years — and it supplies 15 percent of China’s oil.

“It’s going to be very tough,” one senior administration official told me. “The Russian calculus about Iran is only partly about their relationship with Iran and partly about their view of us. Everyone agrees it’s not a great idea for this Iranian regime to acquire a nuclear weapon, but there’s not the same urgency we have, and certainly not the same as the Israelis have.”

There has always been what Donilon called a “back end” to Obama’s effort to talk with Iran, whether in the multilateral framework or in the dialogue he wants to establish to take the poison out of U.S.-Iranian relations. The back end is punitive sanctions, in the event engagement fails, that would change the Iranian calculus on further uranium refinement: cutting off Iranian banks’ access to credit; extending that isolation to insurance and shipping; stopping refined petroleum products from reaching Iran. For all that to happen, Obama will need to prove his outreach is more than rhetoric and that other nations have bought into the notion that a near-boycott of Iran should be imposed.

The administration seems to believe that Iran, as one official put it, “is not 10 feet tall right now” and that means of suasion short of this dubious sanctions route still exist. It’s working to prize Syria away from the Iranian orbit, adopt a more pragmatic tone toward Hezbollah and Hamas and change Tehran’s risk calculus by talking of a sharp upgrade of the defense capacities of allies in the region — all with the objective of further unsettling and isolating a shaken government. Clinton has returned to talk of “crippling action” against Iran — not heard since April, when she spoke of “crippling sanctions” — and late last month introduced the notion of a “defense umbrella” in the region that would make Iran less secure, even with a nuclear weapon.

The latter phrase displeased the Israelis: they viewed it as suggesting that the administration is now more focused on deterrence than prevention. What Obama’s precise tolerance threshold is for the Iranian nuclear program is in fact unclear. Officially, the administration still insists on the “zero option” — no enrichment, no reprocessing, no sensitive technology. But I heard talk of nonzero options — say a small enrichment facility for research operating under intrusive International Atomic Energy Agency inspection — if Iran makes a convincing effort to gain Western confidence and can demonstrate that a fuel cycle it controls will have only peaceful ends. It is also clear to me that a military strike on Iran by Israel is Obama’s least-favored outcome: it would inflame the region he’s trying to quiet and sabotage his outreach to the Muslim world, while perhaps only delaying Iran’s nuclear program a year or two. So deterrence may indeed be the administration’s reluctant bottom line. The president also has at his disposal a covert program inherited from the Bush administration aimed at sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program by penetrating its supply chain and undermining its computer systems. This has been under review, but could, if pushed forward, be used as an argument to the Israelis to hold off any military action.

Would Israel attack Iran against express U.S. objections? Opinion is divided. The Ross team does not rule that out. Indyk thinks not. “Remember, Israel has second-strike capability,” he told me. “It wouldn’t be easy to live with an Iran that’s a virtual nuclear power, but at the end of the day, it’s not a complete disaster.”

Normalization with Iran is a heady idea, comparable to the China breakthrough of 1972. It would create a far less dangerous world. The history-making idea captivated Obama, and it lingers still. Engagement remains on the table, and its unsettling effect on Iran’s domestic politics seem likely to endure. But since June 12, prospects of a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement have darkened. The possible explosion that now looms in Iran, were Israel to attack, could assume devastating proportions and expose America to heightened danger. Obama has staked a lot — arguably his whole “smart power” doctrine — on preventing that.

For Ross, diplomacy is not just about realized goals, but about what you prevent, what you limit, what you contain, what you defuse. Successful diplomacy will take more than Obama-doctrine outreach. It will require a new form of American power to work, in avoiding the worst even if it cannot attain the dream.

Roger Cohen is a columnist for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page MM36 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Making of an Iran Policy. Today's Paper|Subscribe